| The industry I worked in was networking (data center products, routers for ISPs, etc), but technical support. I did that for 20 years. Even though it was pretty high end stuff.... everyone hates technical support and I found that generally companies eventually devalue it as time goes on. I got tired of that system. I got paid really well but just got tired of seeing the atmosphere at company after company get more negative. Poor management trotted in, just coasting, incapable of making changes and such. Despite bringing in massive $$$ in support contracts... that money was never directed to support and things just degrade over time. Then companies would outsource to some garbage company and the support there would be terrible so I and others would take the brunt of angry customers. Then someone would roll out metrics that show those folks overseas who just close cases are doing great because ... they just close cases without solving the issue. The bad stuff just snowballs and there is no going back no matter how valuable you are in support. When I was in support I worked closely with the engineering teams who wrote the code and who really liked how I worked (they'd ask that difficult cases be transferred to me because they know I'd document things, actually troubleshot, be honest if I don't know). They actually picked me at one point to be able to fast track issues that I saw straight to engineering and they'd pick up the phone immediately, because if I told them "you're gonna see this soon (either from a VP or something) because it is bad, you want to get a head start on it" they knew it was real. So I was already curious about coding in some form. I wanted to do something new, got laid off after an acquisition, got a severance, and went the bootcamp route. I like making things now and web development is fun for me, I find that "troubleshooting" and "debugging" and such are all the same thing and that has served me well as well as the ability to work independently and learn independently. |
We've all got bad metrics stories, but wanted to share this one.
Friend at megacorp was doing JS work, and working with the offshore team in India (few people in the US, and 3-4x as many in India IIRC). India team was "killing it" because of all the issues closed, and the US team was getting crap because they "took forever".
One of the mandates was "when you commit code, you need to have a test for it". Friend checked out the offshored code, ran the tests, and ... they failed. Almost all - a few worked by accident, but they were failing tests. Actually, when he first ran the test suite, his whole system locked up and crashed - the test suite runner couldn't deal with that many failures (that was my impression based on the symptoms and repeatability).
The 'defense', such as it was, was that no one had instructed anyone that the tests should actually be run or pass, just that test files needed to be committed with regular code. So they'd write empty tests, or copy/paste code from other tests. The line count and 'closed issues' were both great - so much better than the US counterparts. It's just that... literally... nothing was actually being tested. Budgets were cut and he and a bunch of other folks didn't have their contract renewed - they put more money in to the offshore team. :/